1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method for manufacturing a printer device, such as a method for manufacturing a printer device applied to an on-demand ink jet printer device (termed herein simply an ink jet printer device), or an on-demand carrier jet printer device (termed herein simply a carrier jet printer device).
2. Description of Related Art
Heretofore, this type of the ink jet printer device is such a printer device in which ink liquid droplets are emitted via an ink emission hole responsive to a recording signal for printing an image on recording mediums, such as paper sheets or films. The ink jet printer device is recently coming into widespread use because it lends itself to reduction in size and cost.
In this ink jet printer device, a method employing a heating element and a method employing a piezoelectric device is customarily used as a method for emitting ink liquid droplets.
The method employing the heating element emits the ink liquid droplets via an ink emission hole under a pressure of bubbles generated on heating the ink by the heating element to ebullition.
The method employing the piezoelectric device deforms the piezoelectric device to pressurize an ink pressurizing chamber charged with the ink to emit ink liquid droplets at the ink emission hole via ink entry holes formed in the ink pressurizing chamber.
This method employing the piezoelectric device may be enumerated by a method of linearly displacing a layered piezoelectric device made up of three or more piezoelectric devices bonded to a vibrating plate for thrusting the ink pressurizing chamber via the vibrating plate, and a method of applying a voltage across a single-layer piezoelectric device or double-layer piezoelectric devices bonded to the vibrating plate to warp the vibrating plate to thrust the ink pressurizing chamber.
In the latter method, that is the method of applying a voltage across a single-layer piezoelectric device or double-layer piezoelectric devices bonded to the vibrating plate to warp the vibrating plate to thrust the ink pressurizing chamber, an expensive layered piezoelectric device is not used, so that the manufacturing costs can be lowered. This method, however, has a drawback that fine pitch is difficult to realize at the time of bonding the sliced single-layer piezoelectric device or double-layered piezoelectric devices to the vibrating plate. Moreover, if a paste-like piezoelectric material is applied to the vibrating plate, such as by coating, and fired to produce a piezoelectric device, the firing temperature of not less than 1000° C. is difficult to set, in view of thermal resistance proper to the vibrating plate, such that characteristics of the piezoelectric material cannot be exhibited sufficiently.
In addition, if, after bonding the piezoelectric material to the vibrating plate, the piezoelectric material is cut to plural piezoelectric devices, the piezoelectric material is difficult to cut to a constant depth at all times, due to abrasion of cutting tools or processing tolerances of machine tools, thus occasionally damaging the vibrating plate.
For overcoming the above problems, the present Assignee proposed in Japanese patent Application Nos. 7-193366, 7-1922201 and 7-190750 an inexpensive ink jet printer head employing a single-layer or double-layer piezoelectric device, in which the printing process can be stabilized and characteristics of the piezoelectric material, can be exhibited while the fine pitch can be coped with.
However, the method for splitting the piezoelectric material disclosed in the above-referenced publications is such a method in which the piezoelectric material bonded on the vibrating plate by an electrically conductive adhesive is split by a dicing device, that is such a method in which a rotating blade is in a stationary position and a work, that is a piezoelectric device, is set on a stage and moved in this state in a one-dimensional direction, that is lineally, as shown in FIG. 1. Thus, the processing shape is limited to a linear shape such that the shape of the piezoelectric device after splitting is comprised of linear sides.
Since the site that can be machined by each stage movement is determined by the number of the rotating blades, the number of piezoelectric devices that can be obtained by splitting is governed by the number of blades that can be driven at a time, such that tens of piezoelectric devices cannot be obtained at a time by splitting.
On the other hand, the spacing per piezoelectric device obtained by dicing is broader by approximately tens of micrometers than the width of the blade used for dicing, so that, if the blade 50 μm in width is used, the spacing is limited to approximately 70 μm. Also, if the width of the blade used for dicing is reduced to the smallest value possible, the amount of abrasion of the dicing blade is increased, as a result of which the blade width needs to be set to not smaller than 100 μm and hence the spacing of the split piezoelectric devices needs to be set to not smaller than 120 μm, such that the desired narrow pitch cannot be achieved.